There has been a lot of great feedback and thanks to everyone who has posted. For the past couple days, I've been reading what you've shared and working with our developers to address some of your concerns and suggestions, so let's get started:

A few of you asked about guild reputation being affected by the changes and the answer is no. It's not my intent to sound harsh here so let me briefly explain: Patch 5.0.4 saw significant increases to how quickly players can level with their guild and we're pretty comfortable with the changes as they are.

Many of you have been wondering which factions will be affected by this change. The short answer is we are in the midst of discussing this now. Our thinking at this point in time is to ultimately have all the various factions affected by the increase, but that process will require extra time to test. So one idea we have is to roll out changes to Mists of Pandaria factions first, and then work in earlier expansion-based factions with patches that come later. Granted, this is very much a work-in-progress, subject-to-change situation but keep the feedback coming, it's been very helpful!

With regard to the amount of reputation needed for Honored to Revered, versus Revered to Exalted; we're definitely aware of the difference in numbers and are taking your concerns to heart.

One of the most asked questions so far is, what gives with the tabard changes? When we introduced reputation tabards in The Burning Crusade, they were set to be used as a means to gain attunement for raiding. Sadly, the specificity of each tabard made it so they discouraged players from running dungeons together. If one player needed reputation from one dungeon, while his friend needed it for another, the two ended up not playing together when they would have liked to. You saw the shift away from this philosophy during Wrath of the Lich King and on into Cataclysm.

For Mists of Pandaria, though, we feel dungeons are already rewarding so it made the most sense to have reputation earned by doing things for each particular faction. The various factions are what really bring a lot of the flavor and character to the world of Pandaria. We weren’t very happy that the status quo in Cataclysm was to virtually ignore most factions and what they’re about, by instead doing the fairly unrelated task of running dungeons. It provided a way for players to essentially double dip on rewards from dungeons and faction reputations simply by putting on a shirt when queuing. In Mists we’ve changed the reward structure in a way that we feel makes for a better, more diverse gameplay experience.

For those of you concerned about Golden Lotus related quests, keep your eyes on the forums for some very helpful information we're working on right now that we hope to have posted by Monday.

My work isn't done and if I get more information I can share, I'll be sure to post it. Thanks again, everyone! Your feedback is very much appreciated.

Level 10 characters logging into Mists of Pandaria for the first time will now correctly learn Control Pet and Control Demon.

Pet Battle Blue Posts

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

Pet Battles Achievements
We have a quick update about the Pet Battles achievements you guys have been great in reporting: Cory Stockton has just announced that they've located what was causing the issue and it has been hotfixed. They should be functioning correctly now across both factions. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Pet Battles Hotfixes Update
Here is the latest information I’ve received from our developers regarding some of the concerns you folks have shared with us:

Several of the hotfixes that have been applied needed realm restarts to take affect; with today’s maintenance, they should now be in place

Tooltip text on abilities that had balance fixes (e.g. Siphon Life)

Pets that didn’t appear in the journal (e.g. Crimson Moth); there are still a few pets missing which should show up after next week’s maintenance

Expunge damage has been increased by 10%

Pet Battles matchmaking has received some tweaks, you should now find PvP matches to be much more in line with your pets’ levels even if your opponent’s pets are dramatically different in level

Inputs randomly skipping should finally be resolved as of today’s restarts

We’re still working on Strong and Pristine traps not applying correctly and working on fixing this as quickly as possible

As you continue to take on Azeroth’s ferocious critters, please don’t hesitate to let us know if you encounter any issues, specifically with inputs being skipped. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Pet Battle FeedbackWill we continue to see updates to the system as the game goes on? I would love to see different abilities for pet families being able to be obtained through quests or vendors, or have the ability to upgrade certain areas of the pet (adjust the speed attribute at the expense of power, etc).
Yes. We will be planning additional updates (as they make sense) to the system over time. We'll make sure to share those when we can. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Pet Battle FeedbackNo it wouldn't be diverse. Everyone would pick the most OP one of them all and stick with that.
Not only that, if it was possible to choose your own pet skills as suggested by the OP, people would have less of a reason to go out to explore and search the world for different pets.

The actual system is fine as it is, there just needs tuning and bug fixing.
Indeed

That doesn't follow, at all. I'm not ragging on the pet battle system, it's great. But it could be even greater. All I'm talking about is having one (1) open slot for an optional skill or item which would be gained from dungeon drops, crafting and so on. And nothing OP. Just minor things. Say, a totem that gives you 10% off shadow damage. etc.
I did not think you were ragging on the pet battle system at all, in fact we very much appreciate that you would spend this time coming up with ideas for the pet battle system.

Edit: but back to the non sequitor: how would this make us less willing to collect pets?
Because having a selectable pet skill combined with two "racial" pet skills is much more likely to result in specific cookie-cutter pets, and our experience tells us that as soon as something is cookie-cutter, the majority of players will go for that without question and ignore the rest.

Cookie-cutter pets would mean less flavour simply because the majority of players would go for the same handful of pets, and the rest would simply be disregarded and ignored. People are prone to select the things that are considered best, and in this case it would be a specific handful of pets because their "racial" skills combined with a specific selectable skill would make them superior and therefore the obvious choice... people would simply be inclined to just go get those three pets in the game that are considered best and then stick with those.

I'm not a game developer beyond PHP/Ajax stuff on a hobby basis, but I have a hard time understanding how this can be a problem outweighing the benefits unless it's been implemented with little thought. Of course some combinations are going to be very good but so are a myriad of others.

If what you are really saying is that the excel nerds will completely demolish the people with random cute pets, a little more than now, then I can sort of see that.
I'm not saying an idea like what you suggest couldn't be done and wouldn't be fun, but I am saying that it would most likely result in something that is not intended with the pet battle system. One of the goals with the pet battle system is exploration, to go out into the world to find and gather pets, and to experiment with the different synergies between different pets and pet families... The pet battle system is not meant for the min-maxing crowd, it is meant to be a rather casual yet fun thing you can do in-game whenever you have a little spare time available.

How about adding passives to (some) pets beyond the pet families? Maybe steal some spells off the players? I've collected a decent bunch of pets by now and there's not much variety. That's where I'm coming from.

Edit: I also want to re-emphasize that I'm not whining about the pet battle system, I'm having great fun with it. Spent the last few days going through zones and collecting rare pets and achievements. But I'm seeing maybe 3-4 amazing team combinations; there could be more if pets weren't so strictly formulaized with the same skills across hundreds of pets. Or, having a free slot as suggested in OP. Or, a small chance of one of the skills on a collected pet being drawn from a random pool.
I get where you are coming from, and calling for more variety is never a bad thing. It will just have to be done in a way that will not render a huge portion of pets irrelevant as a result of customisation making a handful of pets the obvious(and therefore the only) choice. (Official Forums)

Eh.. what? As far as I remember, reputation tabards were introduced in WotLK.
I don't remember wearing a tabard in TBC dungeons, instead chose the dungeon(s) that gave the rep I wanted...
Or am I remembering it all wrong???

Eh.. what? As far as I remember, reputation tabards were introduced in WotLK.
I don't remember wearing a tabard in TBC dungeons, instead chose the dungeon(s) that gave the rep I wanted...
Or am I remembering it all wrong???

Nope, they were there, except you needed exalted with the faction to buy them. I've long accepted the fact that blizzard has no idea what they are ever talking about.

Nope, they were there, except you needed exalted with the faction to buy them. I've long accepted the fact that blizzard has no idea what they are ever talking about.

Yeah I know about the tabards you bought when you were exalted.. but they were never any "reputation tabards" as in "You champion bla bla while wearing bla bla...".
Oh well.. I remembered it correctly then

Eh.. what? As far as I remember, reputation tabards were introduced in WotLK.
I don't remember wearing a tabard in TBC dungeons, instead chose the dungeon(s) that gave the rep I wanted...
Or am I remembering it all wrong???

Nah, you are right. In TBC they introduced the tabards you could buy when you hit exalted, WotLK introduced the tabards that required Friendly reputation so you could earn reputation in instances while using them.

Ah, I thought I went crazy when I was running back to my corpse after I died once, but I guess it was just the hotfix kicking in. :/

You are not the only one ...if at least they showed the note about that BEFORE it happened, and I like that they say ''reduced windwool and ghost iron ore'' Liek it was a bug LOL, srly everyone knwo they crank up the respawn rate at the start of each xpac. windwool is less frequent...but at least ghost iron ore is still REALLY present.

I don't know about most people, when I was searching for a Lorewalker guide. Google gave me MMO-C forum post which was posted back in August that was 3 days ago. Seem I would credit the Forum post instead of wowinsider.

I'm beginning to think Blizzard is straight up LYING when it comes to a lot of nerfs by telling us they were bugs (despite tooltips and the actual effects in-game) just to try and keep us from raging.

But hey, this is the same company whom took away one of the best guild perks ever that NO ONE hated (group summon) and replaced it with one of the most useless EVER (the bandage healing increase).

Originally Posted by Caerule

I understand where they are coming from, concerning the world bosses. Still, can't they just make it 50% or only 10% in Pandaria?

*long sigh*

No, summons have a timer when you die too much so one measly death with a faster running speed should not be attacked. So still there is no logical justification other than internally they may have intended it always to be 10% but never told us and now try to pass it off as a bug. Also the 10% only in Pandaria idea of yours might as well be everywhere since ALL endgame content is in Pandaria which is where you will die the most.

Nope, they were there, except you needed exalted with the faction to buy them. I've long accepted the fact that blizzard has no idea what they are ever talking about.

The messed up the context then. They speak about reputation changes and reffer to reputation tabard which would lead to believe they mean the tabards that help people gain rep. I mean why would you talk about tabards at the end of reputation grind when we speak about reputation grind PROCESS?